Medicine dispensing devices which automatically dispense a prescribed quantity of a prescribed medicine based on a prescription are known. For example, the applicants of the present application developed a medicine dispensing device as described above in patent document 1: International Publication Application No. 2010/110360. This medicine dispensing device has received favorable reviews, and has received favorable ratings from pharmacists for its ability to make the operation of preparing prescriptions more efficient.
With this medicine dispensing device, each type of medicine that is dispensed is stored in a plurality of cassettes. In case the medicine cassette runs short of medicine after dispensing medicine, the pharmacist retrieves the cassette from the device, and manually replenishes the cassette with medicine. While performing this task, there is always a possibility of occurring human errors in that the cassette is replenished with the wrong medicine.
An object of the present invention is to prevent a container, which stores medicine and is provided with a medicine dispensing device, from being replenished with the wrong medicine.